by Kali Altsoba
Incompetence is a common problem at the start of all wars, usually on every side, until the white heat of first combat burns away illusions and burns down undeserved commands. It’s a problem aggravated in the Rikugun and Kaigun by hoary Grün traditions of royal appointment. Brusilov is strictly a peacetime and political general. Not as bad as some, but worse than many. He’s more experienced at pushing peas around his plate with a bread knife than pushing forward a blood-and-fire advance against an intelligent, desperate and ferocious enemy.
He’s a man of the blood royale, a distant cousin of Pyotr Shaka III, intimate member of an extended ruling clan that occupies too many command positions in the Rikugun and Kaigun when the war begins, resting on paper credentials and blood connections. Because that’s what peacetime royals do, wear uniforms with unearned medals glowing over their breast, pretending to be warlords in the grand tradition of the founder of the Oetkert dynasty and Grün Imperium. Their ignorance lethally combines with clan entitlement, elite laziness and tactical ineptitude. The problem is disguised so far on Genève and elsewhere in the initial fighting by RIK massive superiorities in firepower, numbers and material. But incompetence will out, especially in battle.
Struggling in his first-ever combat command, Brusilov resorts to brute force. Just as he did back in his civilian governorship when he routinely sent in police and troops to crack heads of bread rioters and arrest and shoot any ringleaders. So he sends in 4,000 more men on foot, noisily crashing into Pilsudski Wood in two widely separated columns. Orders are to penetrate 60 klics straight ahead before bending the columns inward, to close enveloping pincers that must surely “trap and annihilate the bandits.” Years ago he read that pincer tactics were clever in war.
Why go in on foot? Four-man scout hovers are one thing, but the big division ATCs are unable to move through the dense, massively-rooted, dark and drooping woods. Not even shifted down to lowest hover mode. So the infantry gets out and advances clumsily on combat glide boots. Trained in fast advance over open plains, too many men over-accelerate, banging into looping roots thicker than a man and thrice as tall, bashing into huge low-level branches that reach down to the underbrush on the forest floor. It’s dark, it’s frustrating, and it’s slow going.
They’re tactically blind. Their best scouts are dead and 20 destroyed hovers have yet to be replaced. Men curse the forced shift to glide mode, trip over loose undergrowth and misstep into leaf fall many centuries thick. It covers deeper hollows and gullies, trapping stumblers in natural tiger pits, muffling their coms and lost cries for help. They join with the forest forever.
Listening to the crashing, dismounted infantry from 10th Armored are Jan and Zofia and Madjenik, waiting in deep ambush positions that start about 25 klics inside forest cover, sited at the edge of exhaustion and morale for the incoming enemy.
The columns soon feel as if they are the hunted. Blown up by mines at the head of the march or picked off by snipers at the rear. Stalked and killed silently in ones and threes or fives with knives or garrotes should they wander off the trail or straggle behind the main body. Caught by the throat in wire snares if they stay on the path. Men look around and the man beside them is just gone. It’s like they’re in an Andean jungle and sly panthers and drooping pythons are taking them out, one after another. Hauling them off to some terrible, unimaginable agony and death.
Jan gives special orders to the snipers to wound rather than kill. “Wound ‘em bad. I want them so hurt they can’t crawl or walk, but don’t kill them. No head shots.” It’s not misplaced mercy to order wounds over killing. It’s a sound tactical decision. A dead man will be quickly stripped of weapons and equipment but left behind by advancing RIK. Good, one down. But a wounded man howling for help means two or four more must drop from the column to carry him back on a stretcher to the waiting evac bots. That’s three-to-five down or out of the fight with a single well-placed laser snipe.
“Except for their medics,” he amends. “Kill all the medics outright. Fighters always love their unit’s medics best. Killing them will really hurt morale.”
Tramp, tramp, stumble, tramp. “Shoot!”
Tramp, trip, fall, stand up. “Sniper!”
Run, stumble, fall, get up, get hit. “Stretcher!”
Some of Madjenik’s snipers use their own initiative, blending his orders. First they spot and wound a medic, drawing out several fighters who take more chances breaking cover to help a medic than for anyone else. After shooting all the newly exposed runners the sniper turns back to plant a kill shot to the head of the downed medic.
“Displace and repeat! Keep them reeling!” Zofia leads a quarter of Madjenik in darting, diversionary attacks on the long rightward column, hitting it hard to draw it farther right while pulling reinforcements from the left column, for when the main Wrecker attack hits the left.
Box the Fox.
Jan then leads a lightening attack into the flank of the strung-out and reduced leftward column as it passes his hidden positions, cutting it into segments like a worm caught by wrens, devouring each helpless wiggling part in its turn. Forest hollows fill with muffled sounds of rout, smells of burning wood and tree fall, sights of a screaming slaughter of maser-scorched youths. The columns turn to flee, leaving 1,137 dead and 385 wounded behind when they limp back out. Madjenik loses 65 dead and wounded all told, a heavy price but still a trade of 23:1
Wounded are quickly knifed. No one is left alive, no matter how they plead and cry or implore the gods or pity’s sake or their children’s. It’s not done on Zofia’s word or example this time. Jan stands over the wounded and prisoners and gives the explicit order to all Madjenik. “No masers. Knives only. And make it quick.” He kills two himself, to show that it must be done and that he means for them all to do it. He understands now.
‘Zofia was right, back at the meadow. We have to kill all prisoners. I was wrong to judge her, to think that I was somehow above necessity and her. She’s a better officer than me.’
“You’ll make their mothers weep.” She says it to him as he’s walking back, wiping black blood off his knife with a large, damp oak leaf. She says it without malice, as a statement of fact.
There aren’t enough wheat-clad fighters to guard prisoners. And they’d consume vital food and water, and slow Madjenik down as it runs. It’s too dangerous to leave even bound and disarmed enemy behind as Madjenik moves its camp peripatetically around Pilsudski Wood. As for using knives, no charger packs can be spared to maser captured men.
“Strip all dead of anything we can carry. No covering them up this time, either. Let their mates come back into the woods to find and collect them. Let them see what Madjenik can do.”
“Yes captain.” It’s Tom Hipper. “Fourth squad here, to me. Police this clearing. Take everything useful we can carry.” They collect all food packs, canteens, med supplies, and the vital crystal aerographite chargers for their masers, loading as much as they can onto two captured carry-bots. Humping all the rest, along with their own heavy gear and weapons.
Jan can tell himself that killing prisoners is a military necessity, because it is. But there’s something more. For both sides the fight is hardening, shifting past the old prewar rules, moving beyond mercy or pity. Far past even the most basic law of “kill or be killed.” It’s personal now. Vital, coarse and full of hot red rage, vengeance and bloody murder. With plenty more to come.
“We’re a vile and a noble species.” Jan confides the thought to Zofia in a rare moment of down-time. An even less frequent moment of direct talk between them, of honest reflection. It comes during another forced march later that day, just after he orders immediate dispatch by carbyne-knife of another brace of eight prisoners picked up wandering lost in the deep woods.
“Yeah? So be it!” She doesn’t like these fleeting dark moods of his. Suddenly she squints angrily at Jan, startling and confusing him. Like she astonishes him at least twice each day.
“What? Why? ... What, umm, what do you mean, �
�so be it’?”
“I mean be as vile as you must so that we can live to one day be as noble as we like.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You need to, sir. You’re our leader. We need you clear-eyed, not mopey and distracted. Your nobility, and ours, must wait until this hard fight is over. Captain, this is a time for iron.”
In his mind’s eye he sees her in the meadow, holding a Q-carbon blade slick with fresh-drawn neck blood, a gasping and clutching youth bleeding out, his open throat gushing color onto her dirty wheat uniform. The boy’s blood was thick and dark ruby, not crimson like the brilliant red dress she wore that night before the war, when he fell for her hard and forever. When he first met this pretty young officer four months ago.
‘Is that all? Seems more like two years since Gold was doing routine training, back when we thought the pols and diplomats were still on top of things. Before the final crisis came. Before that bunco black op the bâtard locusts pulled on Bad Camberg to set up their aggression.’
He remembers he thought she had eyes to die for. And what she smelled like, before the war began, before all the fighting and killing, before their unwashed trekking over Northland. For she smelled back then like wanton sex, all musty and warm and wet. A faint odor of woman’s musk arose even from the curves of her clean, tight uniform. Strong, earthy, warm and deeply inviting. No military starch or regs stopped it reaching out to his senses. Not even those regs that said no one in uniform could wear perfumes or jewelry. She never did. She didn’t have to. No damn regs could suppress the natural perfumes of her taut body. She knew it, too.
The first time he saw her off-duty and not in her lieutenant’s uniform was at a dance in the dumpy Officer’s Club just off base. He went there that night looking to get loaded. The OC had the best bar in town, and it was considered OK to drink to get drunk there since it was off-base. He didn’t go to dance or for anyone’s or any woman’s damn company. He was pissed off that night about something that typically, he can no longer remember. He was pissed off a lot.
He wasn’t looking for female comfort or company or coitus. Certainly not with one of his officers. Especially, he wasn’t looking for her, for he knew even back then that Zofia Jablonski was a dark and smoky danger to him. If he touched her event horizon he would be forever lost inside her, fall into her eyes forever, never to return. So he held back, not knowing or daring to reach her singularity.
None of the other women in the Officer’s Club interested him. ‘They all look like worlds’ experts on the ceilings of rich men's bedrooms.’ The disdainful and unfair thought occurred to him as he surveyed the dance floor, checking out each woman in turn. Undressing, imagining, and rejecting each in turn. Although he reminded himself that he didn’t go there for that. Until he saw Zofia. She held his gaze, and caught his breath in his throat.
Somehow they ended up drinking over soft talk. Until she left his side, invited to dance by a young officer who couldn’t stop gawping at her breasts. While she spun on the dance floor in another man’s arms their eyes met, catching like a prairie fire leaping across the grasslands of the room, robbing him of air and will. Until he found himself standing tall beside her once again.
He could never remember how he got there, with no words to say as he stared into her round wide eyes that throbbed with physical longing as they looked straight up at him, liquid and green as a surging sea tide. That night she wore a coy perfume atop her native musk that smelled of amber and gentle dogwood, amplifying her own unaided musty scent, teasing him with erotica both natural and assisted by the best seducers civilian chemistry provided. It intoxicated him. It aroused him. He breathed her in, deep and rhythmically, leaning down and in toward her as they whispered to each other, oblivious to all the noisy room. He never wanted the moment to end.
It did. Inept, he watched her move away on the arm of another man, a senior officer with ridiculous gray swatches arcing back from each temple into jet-black, too virile hair. Jan sulked as he watched her sway on the dance floor in that thigh-high slit red dress and black high-heeled evening shoes, tiny blue-ice diamond earrings culled from a gem comet sparkling as they caught the light of the room and her laughing green eyes. She swirled in the older man’s strong arms as lightly as fresh froth atop a tropical surf. She knew she was the most beautiful woman there. For Jan, from that moment she became the most wondrous and unreachable thing in all the Universe.
And he to her, though he never knew it. She looked coyly back as she dipped and caught his gaze brooding on a matching blue-diamond pendant sparkling in the V-curve of her half-naked breasts. She looked like the Milky Way, gossamer and sparkling on a warm summer’s eve. She stole his breath again with every twist and swirl, made him feel flushed and fifteen and all fumbly inside, yet hard with a grown man’s arrested desire. She saw that, too. And laughed.
Later, out in the field at the MDL and since then on the march, he often thinks of her wearing that low-cut red dress, twirling like a madding dervish into his open arms as she never did on that far-off night when he missed his one and only chance to cross the floor and kiss her.
Now, sitting in the woods after another killing of hapless prisoners, he knows she’s right. The time for mercy is long past. The time of iron is come to them all. And upon him most of all.
For the Wolf is on Genève, his sharp incisors running wet with gore and grief. He pads behind Madjenik through the deep-floored woods, drooling with red want from his gaping maw. He has no love in him. He is empty of all but raw red rage. He pants and hungers for more death.
Data search: terraforming.
Result: nanobots, Purity.
Historia Humana, Volume II, Part IV (b)
Most early terraforming projects failed, but 12% were successful. Enough to reshape over 1,100 transiently habitable planets to our will and in our image. The first new world remade by our godlike genius, by direct artifice and our AI-bot’s skill and patience, was a mid-sized Class A in the habitable zone of a nearby K-range orange star. It was called Terra Nova back in Sol, but renamed Rodinia by its settlers. Today it is a quiet, thriving member of the Calmar Union.
Terraforming began with initial microbial rain from orbit pods then accelerated reproduction of anaerobic bacteria seeded into soils, lakes, oceans, and the floating biosphere of open sky. With the biocarpet laid, the first furnishings were re-engineered Old Earth keystone species: various algaes, planktons, mosses, corals, simple plants and hardy grasses. A uniquely helpful addition were echidnas, short-beaked spiny monotremes that greatly accelerated bioturbation with their endless digging, mixing nutrients and species diversity in soils they disturbed in great volume.
AI nanobots, almost inevitably dubbed ‘nanny-bots,’ nurtured and managed all ecosystem development. They also modified genes where necessary to produce plant or animal features specially adapted to unique exoplanetary conditions, such as lower or higher temperature or gravity than the Old Earth Standard (OES). That gave the new worlds we inherited and live on today much greater coloration and bio-diversity, though still confined to a standard range rising from DNA limits.
Using independent discretion, nanobots added varied generations of flowering plants and supporting insects. Advanced animal life included worms, grubs, aphids, ants, and other ground-dwelling insects and their specialized predators. Other predators, including small birds, were added as conditions permitted and insect control demanded. Next came modified shrubs, long grasses and flowering fruit trees, working up to full land-and-sea forest eco-systems in colors that ranged across the visible spectrum. Land ecology now saw interrelated additions of rodents, snakes, larger birds, feral cats, and other smaller predators closely matched to prey species.
When the first settlers finally stepped onto the new worlds they breathed in cleaned air brushing over lakes and inland seas green or orange or blue with aerobic algaes and plants. Fresh-turned dirt of first gardens smelled like home, for it was filled with familiar humus made of generations of mo
lds, ferns, mosses, grasses and shrubs from Old Earth. Soils were saturated with beneficial bacteria, aerated by trillions of worms and ants and grubs. In the air buzzed common insects, pollinating hosts of flowered species. More and more flora and fauna were introduced with each passing year and decade, after first settlement. Within a generation skies filled with song birds and continents overgrew with the first green shoots of what became vast savannas or temperate or tropical forests. Except on lucky Genève where the great golden woods were already planted by AI-bots of singular aesthetic imagination, freely roamed by whole strata of higher wild fauna.
Today many of the Thousand Worlds boast oceans and freshwater lakes abundant with OE species: planktons, corals, fish and sharks, crustaceans and amphibians. River systems, long sterile or more recently sterilized of primitive native life forms, became homes to red or blue frogs, golden salamanders and bright green gators. On favored planets AI-bots dipped into data banks that led them to the highest fauna cultivation, usually on large islands or small detached continents. Vast herds of herbivores thrive there now: gazelle, impala, water buffalo, bullock with pendulous dewlaps and overlarge pizzles, migratory reindeer, forest elk, moose and bison, and restored herds of eohippus. Also their native predators: lions, panthers, tigers, coyotes and roving packs of wolves. Slower big breeders fill our savannahs and tundra plains: African and Asian elephants and two pygmy species of pachyderm, as well as revived great and lesser wooly mammoths and other pre-historic reclamations long tried and successful on Old Earth.